2012 reddit wants their post back dude.
dunking on one of the most oppressive institutions on the planet = “Reddit atheism”
Hexbear moment
Christianity was a life cult. Roman society was a death cult. Which do you think prevailed in Europe, despite the name and trappings. All Henry VIII did was the same as Constantine before him. Transform your death cult to be amenable to the people you need to control. Capitalism is indeed a death cult
Being surrounded by death and choosing to drop out of society to worship your common humanity. Protoancom religious movement. And seeing that you have to universalize your tribe to all of humanity for that to work.
I’m not sure what OP means by his post, but my takeaway is the emphasis on worshiping the Christ-dying-on-the-cross symbol in Christianity. Death imagery is not that popular in most religions, while in Christianity it is. If you mean “death cult” to mean believing in heaven, then many but not all religions would fit that criteria.
Applying the crimes of Christianity to all religions is simply another type of Christian chauvenism. By asserting that “religion” consists of only Christianity you both support its supremacy, since it is already dominant and not threatened by your rhetoric, and help it denounce other religions as “demonic”, since smaller faiths are always being threatened by its dominance.
Who does this? Pretty much every western Anti-theist I’ve ever talked to. All they do is compile all religions into an amorphous blob they can throw stones at. As though Christianity is in any way similar to, for example, the various religions of indigenous Americans.
There are thousands of religions that are currently practiced. Yes there are many that are reactionary, even many small ones, but many are not and none are as intertwined with reactionary political structures as Christianity is. Just because you think all religions are wrong and evil does not mean they are, and its ignorant and chauvinistic to lump literally all of them together.
How about every single religion practiced by Indigenous peoples of the Americas?
I mean yeah it is, but it also isn’t.
I also fucking hate how politicized it’s become. Not that it ever wasn’t political, but, and I know it’s a cliche, but modern evangelicals woulda called Jesus woke
modern evangelicals are calvinists and capitalists, not ‘christian’ in any way.
i’m not saying that christianity or any church is perfect and wholesome. I’m saying that you can’t take 2,000 years of christian mythology and create a consumerist religion out of it. this world is not supposed to matter. the rich are supposed to have great difficulty getting into heaven. jesus literally says ‘sell all you have and give it to the poor’. ofc medieval merchants and landlords didn’t do that, turns out the material world actually does matter to people. but they were paranoically making donations to the poor and the church for a reason. they would send their kids to medicant poverty orders for a reason. liberation theology became a thing for a reason. and the calvinists are here saying that heaven is actually a low tax at will employment haven. not even co-existence with god frees you from work anymore.
i regard neopentecostals as no more christian than the church of unification. ie the moonies who say that actually jesus was a failure but thank god for reverend moon, eternal king of space apartheid. same thing with salafis.
you seem to be under the impression that describing what calvinism is and denouncing the crimes of the international conservative evangelical movement and those of megachurches is, somehow, at odds with denouncing the crimes of, say, the roman catholic church. I think it’s rather telling that you equated the neopentecostals with ‘protestantism in general’, as they are definitely not the same beasts. catholic churches will still have abetted genocide in canada, even as people are impoverished worldwide by evangelical preaching. the catholic church will remain a force against reproductive rights even as my country and the rest of latin america continue to reel under american evangelical propaganda and the afterglow of the jakarta method.
the fact is that the calvinist megachurches exist in a bubble of cognitive dissonance from christianity as a whole. knowing and facing that enemy is important, for no reason other than the fact that quite frankly as a third world leftist I consider american style evangelicals an existential threat while catholic ultras are at best defanged and marginalized. the catholic church around where i live is a bunch of social workers, even as the catholic church in america is indistinguishable from the evangelicals.
I’m saying that you can’t take 2,000 years of christian mythology and create a consumerist religion out of it.
But they can and they did
yeah
you know the part of the bible that says ‘you didn’t pay your servants wages, you’re going to hell?’
actually thats about big government and taxation. why? because rich people back then were the big government charging taxes.
literally the arguments they make
modern evangelicals are calvinists and capitalists, not ‘christian’ in any way.
Christians are incapable of self critique. Its absurd, whether you’re a right wing Christian denouncing gay people or a left wing Christian denouncing nazis, the excuse is always “those arent real Christians”.
The fact of the matter is that they are real Christians, and you need to deal with the fact that your religion breeds wildly reactionary people.
that your religion
i am not a christian, or at least within the complex religious tapestry of my country there’s a tendency for christians to not consider me as one of them. or worse. i’m from a religious minority that was historically persecuted by the roman catholic church. i also wrote a thesis on clandestine torture chambers run by catholic adjacent organizations against ‘superstitions’ ie shock therapy against people who practiced african religious traditions in the most innocuous ways.
but please, do go off. i enjoy when nonces inconsiderate people accuse me of being ‘pro christian’ in a thread where i repeatedly accused the catholic church of genocide
that’s basically any ideology
see: the sheer number of marxists who don’t like the gays
Yeah it still depends on the person. What qualifies as scientific and material doesn’t always hit universally, like the Greek Communist Party keeps being transphobic and their explanation is trans people deny materialism. One time I had a very bitter argument with a well known transphobic Marxist (whose name rhymes with Small Dockshott) and he tried using the “ruthless criticism of all that exists” line on me.
Ideology is a fuck, even our own. Best you can do is constantly examine yourself and find people you really really trust and whose experiences you value. Never ever get trapped inside your own mind, because that’s when your brain starts melting.
